Moments in the Greenwood: Maurice in Context

Abstract

Contrary to E. M. Forster’s private statements, the literary and personal influences that shaped his idea of homosexuality in Maurice were not unique. They reflected, in fact, a broader social and intellectual milieu that alternately inhibited and stimulated the behaviour and creativity of many writers at the beginning of the twentieth century. The nature of that climate and its impact on Forster is the subject of this paper which focuses, more precisely, on two aspects of the homosexual experience presented in the novel: blackmail and working-class lovers. It is useful to begin, however, with Forster’s own assessment of England at the end of its Edwardian idyll and ask what he meant when he wrote that Maurice was part of ‘an England where it was still possible to get lost. It belongs to the last moment of the greenwood’.¹